UB Spatial: an interoperable web-GIS and databases

UB Spatial is an interoperable web-GIS that was initially established as a collaborative project between the Corangamite Catchment Management Authority (CMA) and the University of Ballarat (UB).

The impetus for the project was to provide the most relevant and current Natural Resource Management (NRM) data into an environment where it can be shared with and accessed by catchment managers, researchers, consultants, municipalities, government agencies and members of the general public.

Four datasets have been made available by the UB geology department (and collaborators) who have assembled the data through research, investigation and monitoring undertaken in recent years through the Corangamite CMA salinity and soils programs, viz:

• known groundwater bores
• mapped salinity
• mapped soil erosion
• mapped landslides

The UB remain data managers for these data sets.

The design of UB Spatial is based on the findings of a pilot project in 2006₁ that identified 10 key themes for making environmental and other data accessible via the Internet, viz:

• Flexibility - ability to handle data from varied sources.
• Ability to adapt to a changing environment.
• Fast, effective and user-friendly interface.
• Ability to publish data in its native format.
• Interoperability with disparate systems.
• Data integrity - quality and accuracy.
• Provision of intelligent data and analysis methods.
• Support for open standards and systems.
• Data security.
• Bandwidth and access considerations.

1 University of Ballarat, 2006, Corangamite Catchment Management Authority Final Report, Exploring and reporting on options for making the Corangamite Ground Water Bore Monitoring and Research Database and the Corangamite Erosion and Landslide Database accessible online.

Since the implementation of the web-GIS, the Colac Otway Shire (COS) and Municipal Association of Victoria (MAV) have co-invested in the project.  The COS were successful in gaining funds through the National Disaster Mitigation Program (NDMP) to construct a landslide database.  The MAV, through their Broadband Innovation Fund, supported the extension of the web-GIS portal to COS and the Corangamite Shire (the South West Knowledge Hub project).

The COS portal (www.ubspatial.com.au/cos) was launched on 7 August 2009 by Gayle Tierney MLC at Colac.  The launch was attended by Federal and State politicians and Shire Councillors. 

The COS website includes Council information on points of interest, garbage and recycling collection days, etc. 

Investors in the program to date are:

In-kind support has been considerable.  The Department of Sustainability and Environment (DSE) has supplied cadastral, administrative and topographic data through the Land Channel service; the Corangamite CMA and the Department of Primary Industries (DPI) have supplied aerial images; and both DPI (Bendigo) and DSE (Groundwater) have supplied groundwater monitoring data on a regular basis.  A.S. Miner (Geotechnical consultants) and DPI (Geelong) have provided considerable support in mapping landslides and erosion.  Both the School of Science and Engineering (Geology) and the Centre for eCommerce and Communications at UB have invested hundreds of hours of staff time into the project (i.e. well beyond the funded component).  Dozens of data sets ranging from LiDAR DEMs (acquisition costs >$1M) to student projects (acquisition costs <$5k) have been contributed.

DSE (Groundwater Monitoring and Reporting) has encouraged the extension of the UB Spatial groundwater bore database across the whole of Victoria and have granted funding for data cleaning (2010 - 2012). 

Low-level research is underway to include real-time telemetric data from groundwater level loggers and web-cam data into the web-GIS.

GeoScience Victoria (DPI) has given their support to interoperable exchange of geological data with AuScope and OneGeology.  A pilot project has achieved interoperability with the western Victoria seamless geology layers. 

GeoScience Australia has indicated their support for interoperability with the Australian Landslide Database, in collaboration with Mineral Resources Tasmania and the University of Wollongong.  Technical discussions are ongoing. 

Collaboration with the Australian National Data Service (ANDS) funded Australian Spatial Research Data Commons (ASRDC) project is being discussed.  The Spatial Information Services Stack (SISS) has been installed at UB enabling the mapping of the data in the UB Spatial databases to the Open Geospatial Consortium (OGC) international exchange standards (GroundWaterML, LandslideML, SoilML, etc.).  This will make the UB Spatial data discoverable by other interoperative systems.

Discussions with DPI (Future Farming Systems Research) have commenced to collaborate on digital soils mapping and soil organic carbon projects.  An Australian Research Council linkage grant is being sought for this research. 

Key Contacts